 Coming up on DTNs, workplaces are tracking for COVID. But what about after COVID? A way to let you feel touch in virtual reality and why you should always password protect your stolen passwords. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, November 13th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. Drawing the top tech from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And two miles away from Tom, I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Yes, we have all the time zones covered, Ohio, Colorado, and two miles away from me. What about me? Oh, well, you're in the same time zone as me. Yeah, 150 or so miles away. Yeah. Hey, we were just talking about game consoles. Are you excited about them or are you not excited? Some of us are, some of us aren't. Some of us are excited about different ones. If you want that wider conversation, go get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. 4Dash filed its IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. The company reported it earned $1.9 billion in revenue in 2020 through September 30th, which is up from $587 million in the same period last year. Quite a jump. Net losses for 2020 narrowed to $149 million compared to $533 million in the same period last year. DoorDash says it has 1 million delivery workers, 18 million customers, with 5 million subscribers to its DashPass service. Although the company warned, it may not be able to sustain the growth it's seen during the pandemic. Apple, Google and LG have joined the industry group NextG Alliance, which is creating a NextG development roadmap that will promote a marketplace for 6G. 6G is a real thing. Don't let them over-hype you on it, but it's the next evolution of mobile services. And this group wants to promote adoption, commercialization with North American innovation in mind. The group was created by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and already includes AT&T, Verizon, US Cellular, T-Mobile, Charter, Canadian Carriers Bell and Telus, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm. But not Huawei. No, weird. Yeah, strange. Austria, rather, Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by Facebook, ruling that the company must remove references to defamatory comments than it made about a local politician worldwide. The case dates back to 2016 when Green Party politician Eva Glawisnig successfully sued to have comments removed after Facebook refused to take them down. A statement from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency says that the November 3rd election in the U.S. was, quote, the most secure in American history. The investigation determined, quote, there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. Lot of concern about that going into the election. It looks like they did pretty good. On October 30th, a federal court in Pennsylvania issued a preliminary injunction against a U.S. executive order requiring ByteDances TikTok to either sell off or spin off its U.S. business by November 12th. On Thursday, November 12th, the U.S. Department of Commerce delayed enforcement of the order pending further legal developments, which presumably include an appeal for the injunction. Then Friday, the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. issued a new deadline for ByteDance to sell off its U.S. TikTok operation by Friday, November 27th, which could only be enforced if the preliminary injunction is overturned by then. All right, let's talk a little more about what's going on with Apple. Our chefs have prepared the stories three ways. Yeah, we've got four Apple stories for you to touch on, so let's touch them. Nine to five Mac found evidence in the beta code for iOS 14.3 that Apple will suggest third-party apps for install during system setup. A message in the code reads, quote, in compliance with regional legal requirements, continue to view available apps to download. Microsoft Office and filmmaker tool DaVinci Resolve will both be available with native versions for Apple's M1 chip on day one. An analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that Apple will use something called soft board batteries in the next generation of iPhones. Soft board batteries have fewer layers, meaning phones could be thinner or have more capacity in the same size. Kuo also predicts displays that use 10 to 20% less power and possibly may always be on. Any kind of battery tech gets me going. I mean, the idea that Apple might be preparing for legal requirements to give you selection for things like music apps or browser or mail doesn't shock me, honestly. It seems like something we'd see coming. But using a little different battery tech to either give you more battery life or a slimmer phone, that is intriguing to me. I'm pretty intrigued too, even though I come from like an Android perspective, I just grabbed my first iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPhone 12 Mini, like the first iPhones I've had in like six years or something like that, just today. And I have heard anecdotal evidence from other tech YouTubers that they are noticing a slight decrease in the battery power on the iPhone 12s compared to the iPhone 11 series of like 30 minutes or less. So very close, but it's still a slight concern that there hasn't been an increase in battery efficiency with the iPhone 12s. At least that's what people are reporting. So it would be great to see Apple moving towards a different kind of technology that would allow them to expand it and not have to make the iPhone like a tablet size or make it extremely thick. Yeah, this is LCP soft board, liquid crystal polymer. So it's a more flexible alternative to printed circuit boards. And it also benefits high speed, low latency data transfer. So there's some other uses it might be used for too. So I think the question, oh, go ahead, Sarah. Oh, no, you go ahead. I think the question for me would be, do you think Apple will choose to make the phones stay a smaller size? Or do you think they would choose to like increase the battery size and make a phone larger? If I'm a betting man, I'm a betting they make it slimmer. That just seems like the more Apple thing to do is you keep the battery life. Maybe let it improve a little bit, but maybe you improve it by using those displays that Sarah mentioned and then you make it slimmer and show off how slimmer it is. It's also a much better announcement, right? The thinnest iPhone ever. When you say like better battery life, people go, oh, that's cool. But for the most part, if your phone is working as it's supposed to work, it's got kind of good battery life at least out of the box. But if you have a phone that's half as thick than the previous phone, it's very exciting. I don't know, we're getting to paper thin at this point. I don't really look at my phone. They're gonna be so fragile. It's so thick. Yeah, it's just too thick. But you always say that until you get the thinner one and then you're like, why are we walking around with these like huge thick phones all these years? Yeah, I do think you're right. If they just get a little better battery life, they could say better battery life and that's all people hear, right? I personally would like a longer capacity, but it's not like the battery life I get now is so bad. It's okay. So yeah, I think that's probably where they go. Wall Street Journal sources say China's President Xi Jinping personally made the decision to halt Ant Group's IPO November 3rd, which if it had gone forward would have been the world's largest IPO yet. The largest before that or now the largest so far was Aramco, but before that, the largest was Alibaba, which was also a Jack Ma company. And it turns out Jack Ma may be the reason that President Xi shut this down because at an event October 24th, Ant Group's controlling shareholder and China's richest man, Jack Ma quoted President Xi saying, success does not have to come from me. That's what President Xi said. Jack Ma pointed that out and then criticized government financial regulation or for holding back into innovation. Ma said, there is no systematic risk in China's financial system. Chinese finance has no system. You could see where maybe that would rub the president and other members of the government the wrong way. Wall Street Journal sources claim President Xi read about the speech and ordered regulators to investigate Ant Group and all but shut down the IPO. Ant has made more than 20 million small business loans. It operates Alipay, which is used by 70% of China so it's quite dominant. However, Ant Group has not fallen under the regulations and capital requirements that traditional banks do until the day before their IPO. New regulations were announced November 2nd. That's the day before the IPO. Fundamentally increasing costs for Ant Group. For example, one regulation would require companies like Ant Group, doesn't name them by name but it basically describes a company that is exactly Ant Group, require them to fund 30% of each loan it makes itself. That's a lot of money that Ant Group would have to provide in each loan that it doesn't have to right now which fundamentally changes their balance sheet. In response to these new regulations, Shanghai's star market suspended the IPO and Ant Group went ahead and withdrew it from Hong Kong's exchange. Ant Group can list again but its valuation will likely be much lower and it would not be able to raise as much money because it's not going to make as much money under these new regulations. This is how you do it. You got an authoritarian regime and your tech companies getting a little rambunctious. You don't do an antitrust probe. You just shut down their IPO apparently. It's funny because it wasn't like that sick of a burn from Jack Ma. He was saying, this is what the president said that success doesn't have to come from the person at the top of government and Chinese finance has no system meaning there are many options and look at Ant Group success as a measure of that. So yeah, this seems petty argument between- I don't know man, power and rich. If I'm the person who has set themselves up permanently to develop the best systems in the world through Chinese innovation and you say my country has no system and you're a threat to me because you're the richest man in the country, I kind of see why she would react to that. Well, Facebook is rolling out something new. It's called vanish mode across Messenger in Instagram. After a message is viewed by another party and the chat window is closed, the message will no longer be accessible. All participants in a conversation will have to opt in. That's really important to vanish mode before it becomes active in a conversation. The apps will notify you if there's some kind of screenshot taken while in vanish mode and the feature is not available in group chat. So it's only between two different people. Vanish mode is available on Messenger in the US and some other countries now and it's going live in Instagram in the US and some other countries starting very soon. So vanish mode implies like, oh, I can send this. It'll vanish from both of the devices and no one will ever know. I'll even know if they took a screenshot. Shannon, I'm sure this means it's bulletproof in there. There's no way that that message could ever be saved. Oh yeah, totally bulletproof. Well, there's two things that sparked my concern from reading this article. And the first one, which I mentioned was the screenshots. They say, yeah, you get notified of screenshots, but there's still a screenshot being taken. And again, if somebody is choosing not to take a screenshot on their phone, they could still take the phone, point a camera at it and take a picture of the screen on a different device. So it's not like you're going to know bulletproof 100% that somebody is not taking a screenshot or if they are. And the second one was Facebook does say that you can report people for conduct violations even if they are using vanish mode. So my question would be, and I don't know the answer to this, how long do they keep a copy of the vanish mode conversation and how are they able to track reports and be able to review those reports to find out if people are actually in violation of some kind of code of conduct. Yeah, because this is supposedly encrypted. Yeah, exactly. And they've been doing encrypted conversations for quite some time. So how are they checking in on those violations or are they just taking it from the user's concern and not really reviewing it? I don't know. So I would love to know more. Take a screenshot. Yeah. You know, the screenshot thing gets me too, Shannon, because it implies that if you're like, hey, if you and I, Shannon are having a conversation, I'm like, you know, I got something to tell you, let's go into vanish mode and you go, okay. And it sort of implies that whatever I'm gonna tell you is more sensitive than your average messenger conversation. Right. So the fact that, yeah, if you take a screenshot and I get mad at you because I see that you did it, you still have it. You know, it might be too late for me, but if you're really trying to get me, you know, and you point another camera at the phone, then that's, you know, it's a feature that it seemed to come in handy. You know, when Snapchat first introduced it, I was like, oh, that's pretty clever. And then I was like, it doesn't really change anything though. It doesn't save anybody from anything. I think what we're saying is the primary usage of this is for teenagers who don't want their parents to see their chats, right? Like that's pretty much what it's good for. That's very true. It's not a perfectly secure, like if you're a journalist cultivating a sensitive source, you're going to use signal. You're not going to use vanish mode on message or Instagram. Hey folks, if you want to join in the conversation in our Discord, your messages will not vanish, but you can talk to folks in there and you can join it by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. David Gershgorn writing for one zero discusses the rise of contact tracing devices in the workplace and their use for worker surveillance. An example is Austin's radiant RFID, which has expanded from selling Bluetooth and GPS trackers for equipment to selling stripped down Samsung smartwatches for social distance monitoring. This is important. It emits a signal and if a strong signal indicating proximity to another watch is detected for more than 15 minutes, that event is logged in case either of those employees wearing the signal watch test positive for COVID at a later time. That helps companies detect who might have been exposed to an infected worker. It's good contact tracing. It's a solid reason to do it and it's a way to protect people to say, hey, you were near this person, they tested positive and we know that you were near so you should go get tested yourself, et cetera. Other companies are offering similar products, including Arista Flow, Konexon is working with the NFL and 200 other companies. PricewaterhouseCoopers has been developing something along these lines and other companies are expanding as well. FLIR, you probably know FLIR as the infrared vision folks, they're selling thermal imaging cameras for detecting employee temperature to kind of do a mass scanning as you walk into a place or maybe as you're walking around to say, hey, that person looks like he might have a temperature. You might wanna go follow up and take their temperature just to check. Also facial recognition systems are being used to replace fingerprint sensors for touchless security. Gershkorn makes the point that physically tracking individual workers has usually been reserved for high risk workplaces like health or construction where safety concerns, legitimately outweigh privacy concerns. We wanna make sure that patients aren't wandering off, that nurses and doctors are going to the places that they're supposed to be. With COVID, that safety outweighing security and privacy kind of could describe any workplace. Sarah Kreps, a professor of government and law at Cornell University surveyed 2,000 people in the US and found that 44% were comfortable with contact tracing wearables. That seems like a very high number. It's not 50%, but it's close. When COVID-19 is no longer a concern, the systems will be able to be repurposed because companies will have paid for them. So they might start using them for tracking expensive equipment, for patients in hospitals, or even employees for safety or productivity reasons. And that's where the concern about mission creeps in. I have thoughts. I have thoughts, y'all. There's a lot of concerns about privacy when I read this, but I was also looking at it from a attacker or a hacker's perspective, not just hacking data, but also location hacking or location attacking as a criminal mindset might be. How can you use this data to, for example, potentially determine where employees are at during specific times of the day to kind of determine where you can go to have the least interactions with employees so that you could, I don't know, break into a bank or something. Don't get any ideas, anybody, that's listening to this. But that's something that you might wanna think about is how is this data being transmitted to the bosses, to whoever is tracking the employees? Is the transmission of data being encrypted? Is it stored on a control server that is being encrypted locally while it is stored in just a simple state? Who has access to it? And how is that data going to be protected? There's a lot of things that I was trying to think of in consideration of how they can protect their business so that there's not potentially liability concerns if there's like a break-in or maybe somebody is interested in stalking employees or harassment, because location can give away a lot of really potential privacy concerns for these employees. And not only that, but they talk about, you know, having locations tracked within the vicinity. Like if one of the examples given in the article is a radiant RFID could use wifi. What frequency are they using for the devices that people are using? Are they using a handshake to authenticate to a local wireless router or wireless network? Is it encrypted in transit? How do they know that they're, you know, connecting to the proper wireless network if it is over wifi? How do they know it's not like a wifi pineapple? Right, right, that's the key, right? Because with that situation, I think the PricewaterhouseCooper has a similar thing where you have an app that only tracks you when you are in the workplace, right? But is it using GPS or is it just connecting to the workplace wifi to say, oh, I'm connected to the workplace wifi, I must be at work. But if you have a wifi pineapple, that might not be true. Might not work. And that's another concern. Another example given is using geofencing to be able to only track employees when they are at a specific workplace. But we already know from experience that geolocation data can be spoofed. For example, Pokemon Go players were doing this for years so that they could get Pokemon from other countries. Like who's to say that you can't do the same kind of geolocation spoofing to make employees look like they're not there or make them look like they are there? So that's not even like a COVID concern necessarily, but a concern just about like the safety of the business and the safety of the employees. I also wonder the variety of workplaces. I mean, workplaces, I assume a lot of this is, you're in a building, there are people in proximity. I thought 15 minutes, huh? If I was in proximity to a coworker who was sick, I probably don't even wanna be in the same vicinity as 15 minutes in order to be concerned. I assume that they're trying to cut down on kind of mass hysteria if there isn't a need for one, but it really depends. How high is the ceiling? How is the ventilation? Is the workplace partially outdoors? So it really depends on where you work and how many people you're around. There's a lot of variables. The 15 minutes is a standard for contact tracing to say like, if you were near enough within two meters of someone for 15 minutes, you may have gotten enough viral load, even if they had mass on possibly, to be of a concern. That's a standard that's been set by a lot of health agencies around. So that doesn't really, that particularly just seems like, okay, they're just taking standard practices and using it, right? But it is concerning that, it's not perfect, none of this stuff is perfect. And you are giving up some of your privacy in order to have an imperfect protection. Now, I personally think it's appropriate right now, but I share a lot of Shannon's concerns about like, it needs to be implemented properly. And I think the point of this one zero article, which I thought was very good because it wasn't alarmist was to say, hey, it may be right to use these things right now, but there needs to be a plan to understand how they will responsibly be used or retired when we don't need them anymore. I think that if businesses want to use this after the pandemic has decreased and we can go back to a somewhat normal life, one of the positive ways that they could use this is allowing employees to wear them, but using it to understand the workflow of their environment. So maybe they could increase productivity based on where they put machinery or choosing how they're going to renovate a building based on the workflow of the employees in a restaurant. Like there's a lot of potential positives to doing this kind of location tracking on employees, but it really has to be regulated correctly. And I think that the data privacy and security and how they protect that data is a valid concern. Yeah, there's a lot to think about. I highly recommend going over to onezero.com and taking a look at this article. We'll have it in the show notes. All right, moving on, a scientist at Cornell developed a stretchable skin sensor that uses fiber optics to measure touch. Each finger combines a transparent polyurethane core with an LED-linked core loaded with absorbent dyes. When you bend the fingers, strain it or put pressure on it, the dyes light up and register what's happening where? The prototype glove was 3D printed and it uses Bluetooth. The glove could eventually be used in robotics to give it a sense of touch and better handle real objects. It also can be used in sports medicine for analyzing motion better. And combined with a haptic system, it could provide feedback when you touch a virtual object. Yes, and this is much better at it than the Nintendo glove as someone killing 556 mentioned in the Twitch chat. This is a little more accurate. And this is a big evolution because if we can get very accurate, very sensitive measurement of touch and then you combine that with haptics so you feel like you're touching, virtual reality can start to feel like you're actually picking up virtual objects. Yeah, not only not needing joystick type stuff, but being able to feel while you're in the world. That is very cool. That is so fun. I would love the idea of being able to play virtual games and be able to get some kind of feedback whenever I'm supposed to pick something up. Like if you're playing a FPS and you're supposed to pick up a heavier gun, wouldn't that be cool if you could tell that it's a weighted piece of machinery that you're picking up? Or you pet like a cute little monster and you can feel the fur. Oh. Yeah, and then robotics too. Don't pet the mean monsters. Like, you know, we're just talking about the haptic version of this, which isn't even part of this development, but just the idea of being able to sense pressure, sense touch, could be very useful for robots who handle fragile stuff and it's really hard to provide that kind of sense of touch. And actually the scientists developing this think that sports medicine might be the one that really benefits from it because you can actually tell how people are using their hands recovering from injury or maybe even just, you know, trying to optimize their ability to move. Yeah, or what is causing an injury, right? Yeah, right, right, yeah. It's the future. So cool. Yeah, well, my RSI thanks you in advance. That's great. It totally could work for RSI. Not even just sports medicine. It could work for occupational medicine too, yeah. Yeah, just like, what are you doing that's clearly, you know, the cause of the problem that somebody who's an expert could be able to point out that I don't really know? Like, oh, you're pushing on your keyboard much more than you need to, Tom. Right, yeah. Or like your pinky is doing something weird. Yeah, right, right. No, there's all kinds of good uses for this. And VR is not the least of them. I think the VR aspect is very important. Obviously, this is a prototype since they just have a 3D printed glove with some batteries and a Bluetooth chip, you know, pasted onto it sort of, but it's the beginning. That's really cool. Well, we can sort of laugh and cry about this next story. A cyber crime operation apparently tricked hundreds of thousands of Facebook users into sharing their account passwords. Boo. However, the hackers ended up exposing their own work by forgetting to password protect a cloud database storing all of the login credentials, which meant anybody with a web browser could view the information, including the methods that the hackers used, which was things like websites posing as legitimate services, offering to show you as a Facebook user who viewed your Facebook profile, even though that's impossible, but people love that, which then sent the users to fake Facebook login pages with password prompts and you know how the rest goes. Israeli security researchers, Noam Rotem and Ron Locar published their research Friday with security website VPN mentor and reported it to Facebook. Facebook forced to reset of the passwords for affected accounts and the data is no longer exposed. Ah. I mean, that's that's the comment, right? I mean, obviously, they don't watch any of the security tutorials that I do because protecting your assets with password management. Is a very important topic that we all know. Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of two stories. It's like, well, Facebook users, it's like, you know, you fell for it. There are certain things that a company promising something to you, but you got to just be able to flag that stuff is, no, you can't do that. This is, you know, this is very sus, but the cyber crime operation itself, man, talk about sloppy work. Yeah, there may be honor amongst these, but there aren't always proper protocols. Mm-mm. Well, a reminder to everybody who has feedback on anything that we talk about on the show, we'd love to hear it questions, comments, all the like feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also, a big Friday the 13th shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Chris Smith, Martin James, and DeGrasia A. Daniels. And Len Peralta, as you heard at the beginning of the show, has been here to illustrate our stories today. Len, what have you drawn for us? Yeah, there should be a Darwin Award for cyber criminals. I think this, if there isn't already, this piece is called Show Your Work, which just kind of just writes itself, right? You got a dude standing behind two cyber criminals who are breaking in, and basically the one guy is sort of making sure that the other guy knows that someone's watching him, and he made a stupid, stupid, stupid mistake. I like that one of the hackers here, one of the criminal hackers here is one of those kinds of people that doesn't wear the mask over their nose. I'm glad you noticed that. Yes, he's showing the little nose there. A little bit crazy. Yeah, this piece called Show Your Work is available right now at my Patreon. If you're a Patreon banker, patreon.com.com.com. Or also at my online store, lennpraltastore.com, where you can also order your own custom card, custom holiday card. So go ahead and go check that out today if you can. Sorry, a spider was just crawling up my shoulder. Oh, I was like, I was looking at my own shot, and I was like, oh my gosh. Okay, no matter, it's cool, spiders are cool. Thanks to Shannon Morse for being with us today. Shannon, we love your work. All sorts of security tips, as you mentioned, tell folks where to go. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse, just like my name is spelled. And yeah, there are no worries, no spiders on my YouTube channel, but I do talk a lot about security and privacy, and I have iPhone unboxings coming up very shortly, so keep an eye out for those. Listen, folks, don't ever accuse Sarah of not going all the way on Friday the 13th. Make things exciting. Hey, would you like a DTNS hat or a hoodie or a mask or a mouse pad? We have all that and more at the DTNS store. Go check it out, dailytechnewshow.com slash store. We're also live Monday through Friday, whether they're spooky or not, 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back Monday with Dan Benjamin. Have a great weekend. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.